


you're my perfect little punching bag

by lanyon



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical face-planting of Stiles against hard objects, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-29
Updated: 2012-07-29
Packaged: 2017-11-10 23:04:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/471687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanyon/pseuds/lanyon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles is invariably concussed when dealing with Derek. Derek is invariably angry. Sometimes, though, they get it right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're my perfect little punching bag

**Author's Note:**

> +Spoilers right up to **2.09.**  
>  +This is entirely the fault of my friends on Twitter. I resisted for so very long and all. So, Polly, Neve, Ellie, Yakkorat, Liz and everyone: this is for you.  
> + **Warnings** for violence, discussion of (canon) character death.  
>  +Title from P!nk's _Please Don't Leave Me._

Stiles’ face is smushed against a broad back. His arms, draped over wide shoulders, with iron-strong fingers wrapped around his wrists, feel as though they’re being wrenched out of their sockets and it’s only Monday. He thinks it’s only Monday. He’s being dragged through a woods, or carried, like a sack of potatoes or a very realistic Stiles replica backpack, and he supposes he should be grateful that Derek has apparently read the Manifesto Against Emasculating Stilinski. 

(Rule 8 clearly states that when carrying, dragging or otherwise transporting the non-enhanced, non-werewolf, perfectly normal but completely awesome human away from the site of danger or the scene of the crime, fireman’s lifts are completely prohibited and bridal-style carrying should never have been attempted in the first place.) 

+

The first time Stiles was concussed in the company of wolves, they didn’t actually notice. Not until he vomited, anyway. 

+

The second time Stiles was concussed, he somehow managed to figure out how to track down a rogue hunter. He also charmed Danny into accessing the guy’s bank account and it’s really hard to hunt werewolves while under arrest for credit card fraud. (It was charm, by the way, no matter what Danny says about how it’s impossible to be immune to a relentless wall of sound. It was _charm_.) 

Stiles’ concussion remained undiagnosed until the following day when it emerged that he had no recollection of events. 

+

This is the third time. Stiles just wants to sleep. It’s hard to sleep while plastered to the back of a werewolf, running through the woods. It’s bouncy and bumpy and not, Stiles assumes, in the fun way. 

“Don’t sleep, Stiles.” Derek’s voice has got that weird gravelly thing going on that means his larynx is more wolf than man and, to be frank, it’s one of his more alarming features (and he is a wolf- a man- a werewolf- composed almost entirely of alarming features). 

“‘m not sleeping,” says Stiles. He’s really not. So, he might be drooling a little on Derek’s back but Derek doesn’t get to complain because werewolves in glass houses and all. “So, ‘s like you’re the Chewbaca to my Han Solo, right? An’ the guys are Ewoks. Little _savages_. Where’re you taking me?”

+

After Allison’s mother dies, and it should be a death shrouded in mystery, except that Derek bit her and a knife through the heart killed her, Stiles is heroic.

He talks to Allison. It’s pretty much his greatest strength. He’s a little buzzed on non-hallucinogenic punch and his thought processes ramble a bit but he tells her that he’s not gonna say it’s the same. He’s not gonna say that he knows what she’s going through. He knows what he went through, that’s all, and though his mother didn’t die of werewolf or hunter, the cancer was like some kind of a monster inside her that she couldn’t fight. 

He doesn’t tell Allison that cancer is a worse monster even than Derek Hale because, sometimes, you can reason with a werewolf. 

Stiles thinks that Allison understands what he’s trying to say; that it sucks, that it rips you up from the inside out and there’s a hollowness that will never go away because sixteen is too young to lose a parent, and so is eight, and so is eighteen, and they’re all orphans in this big, bad world. 

+

They get it into their heads that Stiles should be woken up regularly to ensure he’s not dead or something. The thing is, they’re werewolves. Surely they can hear his heart beating, though it stutters sometimes, out of fear when Derek snaps at him.

Stiles is not particularly diurnal but he doesn’t like being poked awake by a pack of concerned werewolves. He vomits on Derek’s shoes. 

“You need a bed, man,” he mumbles, stomach heaving and head throbbing. “‘preciate what you’re doing with the place, werewolf chic and all, but comfort - “

“How is it,” asks Scott, after a moment, “that he can talk so much, even when he’s mostly asleep?”

“If you don’t know the answer,” says Boyd. “We sure as hell don’t stand a chance.” 

Bromance of the goddamned century; that’s what this is. That’s what Stiles wants to say but then all the wolves baring their throats and Stiles is left alone in the darkness, and in the shadows that have teeth, and an arm is draped over his waist. 

“Throw up again and I’m gonna make you eat it.” 

Goddamned _dogs_. 

+

He wakes up, briefly, and there is a bucket next to his bed and a glass of water on the bedside locker and the glow from his laptop fills the room. 

“‘m I hungover or concussed?”

“Shut up, Stiles.” A shadow emerges from the shadows but this is the shadow with teeth. 

There is an arm around his waist and a nose pressed against the nape of his neck and it’s dry and human.

“I don’t need you to defend me,” Derek says, his fingers splayed over Stiles’ lower abdomen. “Not when I’m guilty.”

+

The choice is to level the Hale house or to patch it together.

“MacGyver could do this with a paperclip and a piece of bubblegum,” says Stiles, squinting up at the dilapidated building. 

“I thought that’s what he needed to build bombs.”

Stiles’ nose is scrunched up, still. “Eh. Po-tay-toes, po-tah-toes.”

+

It starts when Derek slams him into the side of the Stilinski house. There are no neighbours about to see this display of lupine brutality. Not a single goddamned twitching curtain. 

“I don’t know,” says Derek. “Whether I want to break your neck or pick you up by its scruff and give you a good shake.”

“You ever hear of the boy who cried wolf?” ask Stiles. It’s hard to speak when his face is pressed against a solid wall. 

“This is relevant how?”

“‘s just. You’re a wolf and _oh god_ what big eyes you have stop _growling_ \- “

“You’re mixing your myths,” Derek says. He releases Stiles, though, and wipes his hand on the back of Stiles’ hoodie like it’s dirty ( icky human cooties). 

“Little Red Riding Hood was a ninja and don’t forget it.” 

+

“I don’t know why we call it a change.” Derek is feverish. Razorblades coated in wolfsbane, threaded under his skin and suddenly the Argents seem a kinder brand of psychopath. “We’re always the wolf. Always, always the wolf. ‘m not at all human.”

Stiles helps Dr Deaton while Derek’s pack stay on the other side of the mountain ash barrier, pale and worried, and Stiles cannot imagine what it’s like to be so viscerally connected to another creature and Derek’s fingers wrap tight around his wrist and it hurts and it _hurts_. 

“Down, boy,” says Stiles and Derek lifts his upper lip just slightly and it’s an attempted snarl and it’s the most heartwarming thing Stiles has seen all week. “Just a few more to go and we’ll give you a doggie treat, how about it?” 

Just a few more, a dozen or so, to be lifted out from under his skin and the cure is worse than the disease, sometimes, and that was always Derek’s fear, Stiles thinks. That can be the only reason Derek never let Scott kill the Alpha.

He wipes at Derek’s damp brow and tells him he’s a brave soldier and he smiles, like sunshine, when Derek threatens to rip out his spine.

+

“Sometimes, I think you’re like a woman, Stiles,” says Lydia.

His mouth drops open and there are so many rebuffs and objections that he doesn’t know where to start.

“it’s a compliment, Stiles,” she says and she’s so goddamned beautiful that he takes her word for it. “You can multitask,” she says. “Not like Scott or Jackson.”

“I’m a precision machine, Lydia,” he says; he runs on fumes and Adderall and adrenaline and anxiety. “I’ve got a lot of balls to keep in the air,” he says, grandly. because there’s lacrosse and his stellar grades and the werewolf underground of Beacon Hills and keeping his dad healthy, if not happy, because that’s a ship that’s sailed or a police vehicle that’s been stolen and totaled. 

Lydia wrinkles her nose. “If you must bring balls into it- “

Stiles always knew she had a sense of humour.

+

Derek Hale has no sense of humour. It was burned and tortured out of him but he’s got this dazzling smile that reaches his weird red eyes sometimes and Stiles can’t look away. 

He wonders what it would be like to cause that smile; to be the avalanche to sweep Derek out of his mind and into that smile. He wonders what it would be like to be first line. He wonders what it would be like to be a good son. He wonders what it would be like for his brain to engage at the right time and in the right way. 

He smiles, though, like the world isn’t a shitty place; like they aren’t all orphans.

+

He’s not concussed. He’s not drunk or hungover. 

An arm lies heavy around his waist and there are shadows with teeth and a snuffling sound. 

‘’m not a werewolf scratch ‘n’ sniff toy, you know,” he says, words slurred with sleep and the promise of werewolf-warm dreams.

“Shut up, Stiles.”


End file.
